Compare And Contrast The Dichotomy Between The Court Aristocracy And The Commoner

Vershuer “[distinguishes] between two classes in Heian society: the court aristocracy and the population of commoners including peasants and craftsmen” (324). The dichotomy between the court aristocracy and the commoners oversimplifies the class structure of the Heian society. First of all, it is indispensable to contemplate upon the authorship of the petitions that Vershuer examines in her essay. The petitions she analyzes were written by neither the court aristocrats who went to the provinces (like Genji), nor by commoners indigenous to the provinces. These complaints were, according to Venshuer, “expressed by the district officials and the local notables who acted as spokespersons for the station employees and corvée workers” (310). The socioeconomic status of these authors challenges Venshuer’s simple dichotomy between “the court aristocracy” and “the commoners,” because these local notables did not fit into the binary: on the one hand, they were different from commoners in that they were literate and could write in “elaborate writing style” (Venshuer 305); on the other hand, apparently they were not court …show more content…
Therefore, all narratives about the commoners in the Heian period were more or less mediated. In this case, the petitions were not voiced by the commoners, but through the local notables who could write. The court aristocrats could not knew a lot about the commoners in the provinces, unless they went there in person. The court aristocrats’ igonorance of the provincial life is evidenced in the absence of the detailed description about Suma in The Tale of Genji. As a female, the author of the novel, Murasaki Shikibu, was unlikely to have the experience of traveling to the provinces, not even to mention talking to the commoners. Like his character Genji, “everything at Suma was different”, and mountain folks were “a mystery” to her (Shikibu